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Grrrr, they would have to release this in the middle of me being out of town three weeks in a row. And with Defend Your Honor being such a must have I gonna need to make arrangements to acquire a copy in time for Boston.

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Grrrr, they would have to release this in the middle of me being out of town three weeks in a row. And with Defend Your Honor being such a must have I gonna need to make arrangements to acquire a copy in time for Boston.

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I'd prefer to support my FLGS. Plus I have store credit there so I have to spend less actual money.

If you're tight with your store owner they may be willing to deduct your store credit from your account and then pay another shop so you can pick it up there. I've had a shop owner do that for me once when I was in a similar situation.

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Ancestral Shrine seems ok for Phoenix. You're gonna return those rings anyways, so getting some free honor off them in the Fate phase seems alright. Phoenix does have some great holdings to compete with, though. I also like Kiku Matsuri. More honored characters is great for Phoenix. I'm probably going to try it out in Isawa Mori Seido decks, but again, not sure about going up against Manicured Gardens. Seeker of Air is more appealing now though.

Shinjo Ambusher and Outskirts Sentry both seem great for Unicorn, and I could see Ambusher being splashed in many decks.

Unmask seems pretty good. It'd be nice to play it on your own character and drop their dishonored, but I think 80%+ of the time, you're playing it on their Banzai'd dude. Versatile card, so I expect any void Scorpion builds to run it.

I'm on the fence about Severed from the Stream. Very niche uses, but there are times where I'd pay 1 to steal Imperial Favor, and that's important to Phoenix a lot of the time, where a good Fate Worse than Death can ruin your game, and you need Censure backup. Though to be honest, it's been a while since I've played outside my small group, and I'm not sure Censure sees much play besides me.

I like Paragon of Grace a lot. Even non-random discard can hurt, but at random every round is painful, and the stats are still decent if they get Clouded.

A lot of misses, though. Civil Discourse in particular seems bad to me. Spending a fate and a card up front to shut down your opponent in one conflict just means they'll be coming back later to punish you for it, and you still have to win the duel against their top guy. Good for closing out that last conflict, but you're paying a lot for it.

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Ancestral Shrine seems ok for Phoenix. You're gonna return those rings anyways, so getting some free honor off them in the Fate phase seems alright. Phoenix does have some great holdings to compete with, though. I also like Kiku Matsuri. More honored characters is great for Phoenix. I'm probably going to try it out in Isawa Mori Seido decks, but again, not sure about going up against Manicured Gardens. Seeker of Air is more appealing now though.

You can also use it to set up extra Tsukune targets of rings you really want to claim again at the end of the conflict phase if you don't care that much about favour or are up enough on the glory count.

31 minutes ago, AradonTemplar said:

I'm on the fence about Severed from the Stream. Very niche uses, but there are times where I'd pay 1 to steal Imperial Favor, and that's important to Phoenix a lot of the time, where a good Fate Worse than Death can ruin your game, and you need Censure backup. Though to be honest, it's been a while since I've played outside my small group, and I'm not sure Censure sees much play besides me.

Severed with Tadaka will be the real soul breaker. This now means Phoenix have 6 ways to ensure even when you go for Earth Ring while he is in play you don't get it.

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Edit: Actually that makes me like him a lot more, now. 1 fate per point of skill is a steep cost, but as a 1-fate body that's not terrible.

The main issue is he takes up one of your 10 conflict stats and there are better impact bodies that could end up in that space. I can maybe see him in HMT Lion as another cheap scrificial bushi to drop and activate your box, but I don't see playing him otherwise. Unless to claim that sweet wandering ronin bounty than he goes in every deck.

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I don't play competitively, but I've been impressed already with the variety of deckbuilding. In MtG, I've generally gravitated towards one or two types of decks per color or color pair. If I built a blue-green deck, it'd pretty much always involve the same sorts of cards. By the time Underhand of the Emperor came out, though, most clans had two or even three strategies and focuses I wanted to try out. Sometimes they're fairly minor variations on each other, and they're not always great (one might say, JANK), but they've always felt thematic and interesting enough to at least put together and try out. As the game develops, I see that only becoming more so, as clan packs add specific tools for new strategies like the duel-focused Crane, or a weird long-game Unicorn with their newest stronghold.

My biggest disappointment so far with deckbuilding has really just been in role-restricted cards that have felt incredibly under-whelming. Some have been great, but some of them like Lion's Writ have been unplayable.

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My complaint about lack of variation is about community attitude more than existing ability to experiment, as up 'til now there's been pretty much one "best" build (at least in dragon, it may have been different in other clans) and if you tried to do something other than that build people wouldn't give any sort of constructive criticism to make the idea as good as possible, they'd just tell you to play that build instead. At least that's how the dragon discord is, don't know if it's any better elsewhere or with other clans.